"You're a Wizard, Harry"

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This trip keeps getting better and better. Monday night we all met up with Professor Soybel who took us to Pizza Express for dinner and drinks. I was told it was "the Micky D's of London". Whoever told me that lied. My dinner was named "The American" aka pepperoni pizza (although I added a bunch of stuff on top of that). Besides cheese pizza and pepperoni "American" pizza, a lot of the other combinations sounded strange to me (that means a lot coming from a kid whose Dad likes anchovies and garlic pizza). We stuffed our faces with pizza, topped it off with beer and wine, and for dessert--cheesecake and ice cream! And you know me, I would do anything for a slice of cheesecake.

It was good to chat with Professor Soybel. She always comes at the start of the third week (second week of our internships) to make sure everything is going well and to do some recruiting for next year. She also meets with all of our employers, as does the company who sponsors our visas. It's kind of weird seeing all of these Babson professors in London and not on campus, but it is so much nicer to see them in a relaxed setting and be able to talk to them on a personal level.

I started off work on Tuesday with a phone conference between two of my superiors, who were impressed with my IT knowledge and mesmerized by my "crazy American spellings". While I was screen sharing and typing something important, both of them stopped to laugh at the way Americans spell "authorize". To quote one of them, "Americans are so funny the way they use their 'zed's' (Z's)". My spell check on my BT laptop (it's British) goes crazy every time I write something because the British spell check doesn't like it. My coworkers told me my American spelling was fine as long as I promised to spell "color" as "colour".

Ayush and I are learning more and more about huge corporations everyday. British Telecom is a regulated monopoly, and as such, there are certain things they can and cannot do. And, because about 40 years ago their prized BT Tower was bombed, they've increased security a million times for the Olympic season making it very hard for us to go on a walking tour to all of the BT buildings in the area (there are a ton!). We had lunch on the rooftop balcony overlooking the entire city at one of the BT buildings today, where we met one of our bosses named Jen. Jen gave us a lot of really cool tips about how to be proactive in the workplace without being pushy or coming off as arrogant. Professor Soybel also came with us and she bought us all lunch, which is always a nice surprise.

After finishing lunch and saying goodbye to Soybel, Jen took us to the BT archive building. It's a mini museum, dedicated to BT, which is the oldest communications company in the world, dating back to the 1800s. They had a million different binders with pictures and records, almost none of them having been digitalized. We also got to see the first phones--something I've seen before in museums but it was fun to hold up my iPhone next to it and see how far technology really has come. The research librarian also showed us the ships that BT used to own. Underneath the ocean are all of the cables which allows countries like the UK to connect to other countries across the Atlantic Ocean, like the United States. However, whenever there is an underwater landslide, someone has to be sent down from a ship into a submarine and then go underneath the ocean floor to repair the damage. We also learned how during World War II, England's enemies would go and destroy the cables in the ocean, which would disconnect England from its allies. Then, they would have to send someone down to the bottom of the ocean, where they risked being torpedoed, to repair the damaged lines. It's crazy to think that almost no one thinks of this!

We also went to Openreach's headquarter's across from King's Cross station. It was so exciting! That being said, the station looks nothing like the King's Cross in the movies, although we're guessing they might have done some construction work in preparation for the Olympics. (Later edit: We just learned that King's Cross and St Pancras Station kind of did a flip flop, and so what was King's Cross in the books and movies is actually not King's Cross in real life anymore.) We also learned that Jen's boyfriend's sister is the author of the Warriors series (it's a series about cats--my sister reads them), which Jen told us is the equivalent of Harry Potter to Americans (I guess Harry Potter isn't as big to the British as it is to us Americans for which Harry Potter was our entire childhood).

Once at Openreach's headquarters, we were able to see how their network really works, and get to touch a bunch of the wires to better our understanding of their system. It's a lot easier to know the difference between copper and fiber fibre when you've seen it in person. We also walked passed the CEO's office and got to see a lot of the VPs.

After work, five of us went to Shakespeare's Globe theatre to see Henry V. Unlike some of my peers, I had never read the play before but I wish I had. Last night I learned that I understand more French than Shakespeare. There were a couple of scenes all in French and true story, I understood more of what was going on in those scenes than any others. That also might have been because I was watching the musicians for a good portion of the time. I didn't realize that Shakespeare's plays were musical like in the sense that there was 15 minutes of music at the beginning of the show, and at the end of the show the entire cast sang. What was really distracting was the Renaissance Lute player (looks somewhat like a modern day mandolin) doubled as a snare drum player. It was quite obvious which one of the instruments he was professionally trained on. I'm not sure I've ever seen someone play the snare as...um...interesting as he did.

Anyways, the play was actually pretty good. With the help of SparkNotes, I now understand the play much better. For those that haven't been to the globe, it's reconstructed as best to scholars' knowledge as possible, and thus if you buy the cheap seats because you're a college student, you stand in the very center of the theatre. Unfortunately, that's three hours of standing, and also unfortunately, I was standing behind a girl that could have played in the WNBA if she wanted to. Also unfortunate is the fact that the plays are performed exactly how they would have been back when Shakespeare was alive, in the time period where there were no announcements about turning off your cell phone before the show started. Even more unforunate was the fact that five minutes into the play, someone's cell phone went off. And, unfortunately, that cell phone belonged to me.

It turned out that that phone call was my boss, who was calling to say he wanted Ayush and me in Brighton at 9 am this morning for a team meeting. So, we were at Kings Cross station by 6:30 AM, which means that my alarm went off this morning at 4:45. Brutal. That being said, Brighton, which is on the coast of the UK, was worth the trip. What I didn't realize was that it was not really a team meeting but a high level manager meeting (my boss is one behind the general manager). In fact, it was on the train to Brighton that we learned that our final presentation will be in front of the general manager...so no pressure to have our everything perfect or anything.

I obviously cannot write about what we discussed in the meeting, but what I will say is that you don't realize how much you learn at Babson until you are in the workplace. With the exception of the engineering stuff, everything that was discussed in the meeting I had learned at Babson. And, even then, a lot of the engineering things were tied into things that were drilled into our heads at Babson. When my boss asked me if I was keeping up, I was able to honestly say yes, which kind of made him do a double take. We Babson students are smarter than we look.

Speaking of being smart, if you want to save time on figuring out when I've been posting this blog, you can always just subscribe to my blog and then I think it emails you my blog post, or at least tells you when I've posted so you can stay up-to-date. I know it can be annoying checking back to see when I've updated my blog. And on that note, I'm off to dinner with some local London Babson alums. At this rate, I will probably be a local London Babson alum one day!

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Photos

King's Cross Station
Bet you can't guess which book this station is in.

St Pancras Station
The inside of this is what King's Cross looks like in the first Harry Potter movie.